How I wanted to update a website, but ended up building an AI-first CMS that replaced Webflow

It started with a pricing page.

We had a Webflow site and wanted to show different prices by country. $49 in the US, A$69 in Australia, NZ$89 in New Zealand. Same product, country-aware pricing. Basic stuff.

Webflow has no clean way to do this. Every workaround either costs extra, requires a third-party service, or makes the price visibly jump on screen as the page loads.

So I exported the site, dropped it on Cloudflare, and solved the pricing in about ten minutes.

Then I tried to update the menu. And that's when things got out of hand.

Problem: no shared components

Static HTML has no concept of a shared header or nav. Change one link and you're editing every page by hand. So I added a basic template system.

Then: needed somewhere to store content

Templates needed data. Blog posts, product listings, team members. So I added a lightweight CMS — which immediately meant I had 80 old posts to move across, so I built an importer too.

Then: editing copy was still painful

Changing a headline meant opening a code editor, finding the right file, committing, pushing, waiting for a build. Five minutes of overhead for a three-word change. So I added click-to-edit directly on the live site.

Then: what if you could just ask for a new section?

I wired up an AI agent that edits the site's templates directly. You describe what you want, it shows you a live preview, you accept or decline.

That last step is where the project stopped being a personal tool and started being something worth sharing.

Each problem after that followed the same pattern. Moving off Webflow meant losing image optimisation, so I built an optimiser. Static sites can't handle contact forms, so I built that too. Connecting to Cloudflare took an hour of dashboard-wrangling, so I automated it.

Each fix took a weekend. Each one removed a paid subscription.

Where it landed:

- A CMS with templates, content collections, and rich-text editing

- Click-to-edit for non-technical people, directly on the live site

- An AI agent that can redesign pages or build new ones on request

- Automatic image optimisation and one-click SEO fixes

- Form handling with spam filtering and file attachments

- Cloudflare setup that used to take an hour, now takes three minutes

It runs on a $5/month VPS. Cloudflare hosting is free.

Webflow subscriptions cancelled, plus Formspree, an SEO tool, and an image CDN we no longer need.

Saving around $400 a month.

The original site, the one that started all of this, was the first to go live on it.